A Like and Its Value

Recently one can detect a perturbing tendency concerning social media, having a deficiency in measurement and accountability. All advice you can see at numerous marketing conferences, countless blogs, books referring to new media are general ones like ‘participate in conversations’ or ‘be staggering.’

Marketers still strive for high ROI for such channel as search, email, display advertising of online marketing. After all, many neglect return on such social network service as Twitter or Facebook.

The VOAL formula is helpful to ascertain the definite value of every social network service. Here it is:

TL/UM•(30•LD)•(C/TL)• ACV •CR = Value of a like

The total number of people connected to the account on a social networking service are designated as TL (Total Likes), e.g., on Facebook they are likes of the page while on Twitter they are usually called the followers.

UM (Unlikes per Month) is the average number of followers per month who do not appeal to your account on a social network (Facebook’s ‘unlike’ and Twitter’s ‘unfollow’).

Links per Day (LD) means both the number of posts having links and potentially converting links from your account. LpD on Facebook is the number of posts that you make each day which have a link to your website. But on Twitter it stands for the number of times you tweet such kind of links per day.

Average Clicks (C) is the average number of clicks on the posted on your social media account links to your website.

Conversion Rate (CR) stands for the proportion of visitors of your website. It can be a total average, but for high accuracy it’s better to turn to account the rate measured in the social network which you are calculating.

Each ‘conversion’ has the average value, called Average Conversion Value (ACV), for example average lead value or sale price. For higher accuracy one should use the ACV of traffic that comes from the definite social network.

It is easy enough for any marketer with proper analytics software like HubSpot’s Marketing Analytics or Google Analytics to trace the traffic from social networks as well as define customer or lead acquisition values. More difficult task is to determine the amount of time you are able to spend and the available sum of money.

Calculating a churn rate for your social media L and UM are used in the beginning of the formula that allows you to find out the average amount of time needed for individual user to connect to your profile.

In the remaining part of the formula the VOAL metric is calculated for each user who follows the links.